I made a form for customer development with Google Docs. Ok this not a First Customer Contact, but maybe it will help although.
If you are interested in the state of Linux on laptops you should fill in this form.
The Bootstrapping “The Four Steps to Epiphany” series is suspended for a while.
That is because I was working on a small business plan to get some support money. So it is not bootstrapping any more.
In the next week I will come back to Bootstrapping “The Four Steps to Epiphany”. With financial support or not.
Just a short report on Customer Development.
Right now I am having trouble finding new interviewees.
Also the time I am spending on CD is a bit limited, therefore I will focus a bit more on CD after my vacation in Spain.
Only a brief post.
Today I made my second First Customer Contact.
I got some new insights, the person I met was totally different from the first.
He was much more introverted than the last one. On the other side he was a great programmer
and technically very advanced.
Maybe one day he could be a partner or something.
His greatest problem with Linux (He uses Debian) is that upgrades don’t run smoothly all the time.
Oh yes, I still talk to much about my idea and listen not enough. Puh, listening is harder than you think 
This weekend I had my “First Friendly Contact”. Surprisingly the conversation didn’t take about 20 minutes, it took about one hour and a half.
This was a quite interesting experience for me, facing people and not telling them about your idea. Instead you try to get their ideas and thoughts on the topic.
This is a quite difficult task. I often switched back to telling and justifying mode, where I was justifying my idea. The ultimate goal in customer talks is listening, this is harder than you think.
This was my first official Customer Development conversation.
Last weekend I was at FrOSCon in St. Augustin, Germany.
The FrOSCon is one of the three greatest open-source conferences in Germany. I thought this should be a good place to meet influencers and learn about the open-source market in general.
I got to know Dries Buytert the project lead of Drupal CMS. He held a very interesting key note about growing a (oss) community. Dries is a very nice guy, he finds a good balance between being a geek and being a great communicator. Dries is an entrepreneur also, he founded Aquia, a Drupal based startup, that wants to be to Drupal what Redhat is to Linux. I have no doubt that Dries will succeed with his company.
Dries preparing his key note (shot from my Nokia N810)
I learned a lot about the my customers, that they:
, that has clear symbols and guidelines that they live by.Besides that I got to know a bunch of people that work in neighbor markets that could be helpful in the future.
At the end the FROSCON was a very interesting event for me, that was fun, too.
Now my job is to get contacts to people that could be my assumed customer. To learn more about their lifes, needs and feelings.
The List is how I call the 50 contacts you want to meet in person.
At the moment The List has 9 entries. But now I am a bit lost to find more people to put their names on The List. I hope to get more names for The List after meeting with a few guys that are already on The List.
If I am lucky, somebody will eventually join me and my business idea, what would be of great help. At the moment I find it very hard to go on my own.
I tried to contact four guys on The List and three agreed to meet.
We will meet in a bar in my hometown Wiesbaden, Germany.
Kurhaus Wiesbaden, Germany. Photo: marfis75
I chose a casual place (No, not that one in the picture!) to reduce tension, that people don’t hold back with their oppinion and to save some money .
I will try to present them my problem and my product hypothesis and then step back. I assume that it is key to let them tell me their opinion and their feelings about the problem and my solution.
I will write about my experience from the First Friendly Contacts in a later post.
Photo: mockstar
After the hypothesises are done, we are now entering phase two. This is were I have to get out and try to prove my hypothesises about the customer, the product, etc.
Mr Bank splits phase 2 in four different parts:
Normally you execute every part till it is complete and then move on.
For example in the Friendly First Contact part you are trying to establish a list with 50 persons you do wanna speak to and get as much appointments as possible. In the appointments you would present the problem and so on.
I will mix this up!
Until we will enter phase 3, I will write posts that are dealing with one of the four parts of phase two.
I won’t follow a specific order. I will go on to phase 3, if I think that all parts of phase two are completed.
My next post will deal with Market Knowledge.
The ideas for demand creation are rather immature of course, but you have to start somewhere.
We will have four pillars for marketing.
This was the last boring “Hypothesis”-post. I will quit phase one now and will move on to get out of the building. So stay tuned…
The only channel will be just a central webshop. The strategy is to have Germany as test market and then if it works spread over Europe and maybe the United States (But this is more dreaming, first things first!). We sell directly to the customer.
The price is based on competing products that do things in a different way. It ranges from about € 800,- to € 2000,-. Our price should be one grand (€ 1000,-)
Normally just one per household, maybe two or three if more Linux enthusiasts are present. Basically they numbers shouldn’t change if the product were free.
